Squinting at the movies

Posted at 4:15 PM on January 9, 2007
by Euan Kerr

Make sure you have a chance to read David Denby's New Yorker article "Big Pictures" about the future of the movie business. It's a long piece, but deftly draws together the challenges and the opportunities facing not just Hollywood, but in a way audiences too.

Perhaps the most cheering part of the article is the section on the future of movie theaters themselves in the day of the download and the iPod. Denby thinks they are here to stay and for a simple, primal reason. He quotes writer/producer James Schamus who heads Focus Features, and is a long-time collaborator with "Brokeback Mountain" director Ang Lee, on how executives can remember what it was like to be 21.

“You want to have sex with someone,” Schamus said. “You say, ‘Do you want to go the movies with me Friday night?’ Movies are a pretext for social interaction. So don’t think of the future in terms of technology. It’s not a question of platforms but of how people want to use social spaces, how given ethnic and age groups want to interact.”

Denby argues that no matter how many extra features there are on a DVD the theatrical experience will never lose it's value.